Snow in May

(Paperback)

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

The stories of Kseniya Melniks debut collection are small-town miracles, each a miniature epic.
Their focus is Magadan, a town in the Northern Far East of Russia, and the unvisited lives of its inhabitants and emigrants schoolchildren, doctors, teachers, mothers, daughters. Some characters span several stories. Some of their stories span decades and continents. The measure of their telling, though, is invariably the measure of everyday existence. Their dramas, too, are made of quotidian stuff, each life with its own sly or suppressed tragedies, and its brief, often unexpected ecstasies.

Kseniya Melniks sensibility is sober and humorous; her stories are moving and funny. In their patient, deliberate unfolding at once surprising and convincing and in the fitness of their details vital because they are suggestive we sense, above all, an assurance that is dazzling.

Reviews

Shes inherited her native countrys literary giants passion for soul-searching and dramatizing the shared fates that bind people to places. Max Liu, Independent

Advance praise:

Melnik is very talented, and this is an unerringly assured and dextrous first book. Its a big compliment when I say it merits comparison to Jennifer Egans wonderful A Visit from the Goon Squad the way perspectives prismatically glide from character to character and era to era, showing the simultaneously redemptive and remorseless work of Time in lucid and elaborate cross-section. Needless to say, though each story works on its own, they build beautifully together.
The writing itself is achieved, finished, and gleams with unexpected imagery, gorgeous idiomatic reconfigurations of clichs and memorable aphorisms. Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins

Funny and sad, tender and tough, Melnik's stories reveal a writer who is wise and insightful beyond her years. Melnik's grasp of the realities of the twentieth century Russian Far East is startlingly accurate, but these stories are not anthropological studies the characters transcend the setting, and they will break your heart. Anya Ulinich, author of Petropolis

The best story collection you'll read this year. Darin Strauss, bestselling author of Chang and Eng, More Than It Hurts You and Half a Life

Author Bio

Kseniya Melnik was born in Magadan in the northeast of Russia and immigrated to Alaska in 1998, at the age of fifteen. She earned an MFA from New York University and her work has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Epoch, Prospect, Virginia Quarterly Review, and was selected for Granta's New Voices series. She lives in El Paso, Texas.